That sounds great!
This chap made it a labor of love.
Personal Encyclopedias
91–100 of 197 posts
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#92I am starting to do this with actual physical books. I have thousands of photos going back over my life, and I am putting them together in Scribus to then go and print a physical book for each year or event or holiday along with some relevant text. Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical form, unlike all the digital things we spen…
I love making Zines, but I don’t make enough of them. That might be a nice medium for something like this.
I’ve also done some light-fast testing. Laser prints (both B&W and color) survive a long while in direct harsh sunlight left in the window of my Utah home. All types of pen I tried were faded within a couple years but Pencil survives.
A 360 degree stapler is a fantastic tool for quickly binding them.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#93Amazing work there @jrmyphlmn . Very recently I was thinking about how to preserve photographs I have collected over last 10 years in my external drive and instagram and unchecked SSD cards. Time to weave them all together. Bonus for me to be the 100th github starer on your repo
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#94That sounds like a really cool project and a really interesting way to preserve family history. I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing eve…
there is an activation energy cost to so many activities - so those things just never got done. many times it is because the cost-benefit wasn't clear at the start (unknown unknowns) so it never got done. kudos to op for experimenting and showing us one way of making something like this happen.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#95The project itself is cool if you have access to a LLM API endpoint with good privacy (perhaps your own GPU server). I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.
I'd be more worried about the bank statements than the photos.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#96I quite love this idea. Both of my grandfathers died last year and going through their early memories was amazing. I would love to be able to preserve that and make it shareable with the rest of my family.
Nice work!
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#97I like my memories ephemeral and fragile. Reading AI-generated articles about my loved ones in the typical apathetic Wikipedia tone sounds like a deeply unnerving experience to me.
Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning yourself ? I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I would love to read all about the events in the lives of my ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back generations. Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing, where they spent their first holida…
Good point!
I already write some stuff down that I never intend to read myself but hope would be of some use for future generations. It's not always easy knowing what's worth recording. And sometimes really boring stuff can be interesting 100 years from now, but you wouldn't know.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#98This is a really fun project and the family interview transcripts + LLM workflow feels like a genuinely good use of the technology.
I would probably have ended well before "I exported my Google Maps location history, Uber trips, bank transactions, and Shazam history."
Aside: I've started seeing lot of AI projects in this category say some variation of:
> it runs on your machine, your data stays with you, and any model can read it
I don’t think people fully appreciate the tension in those claims, especially when the model most area reaching for is Claude or GPT or Gemini. I think these things need more precise language about where data actually goes and what tradeoffs users are implicitly accepting.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#99> Private by default
> Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored remotely.
Sure, the wiki is private. However, in the process your data is being uploaded straight to an AI company. Of course local LLMs exist but that’s seemingly not supported here and I think the statement on privacy could be clearer.
Re: Personal Encyclopedias
#100I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it. Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, disc…
This is an incredibly cool idea. I'm gonna talk to my wife about doing this with my girls. Thanks for sharing!